I've read a few posts about other people using X-Plane, in particular about Whirlygirl & Whirlyguy's setup,

I'm wondering if I've just not got things setup correctly, or it's just the big difference in flightmodels between MS Flightsim and X-Plane.

I've tried a few heli's on X-plane, and understandably they are 'challenging' , especially at first. They feel almost like the heli's used to in earler versions of flightsim. Now wether this is because flightsim eventually improved heli's, or wether they dumbed them down I don't know..

The main thing I'm having a problem with is pretty much any heli I fly seems to go nose up when I raise the collective a lot, and even full forward cyclic won't bring the nose back down. This makes forward flight somewhat awkward, and descending even harder!
At the moment if I have the collective raised up I have to lower it what feels like quite a bit to get the nose to drop and induce some forward momentum (in lower hovers near the ground it's OK, but once I'm up higher it won't tilt forward using the cyclic).

I've checked and tried various different settings on the joystick settings (linearity, dead zones etc), and when I look at the moving control inputs graph it seems to be using the full range of the stick,. I've set and reset the center numerous times as well.

What I'm wondering is if I'm thinking there is some sort of config problem with the sim/physical problem with the stick , when in fact it's just X-Plane modelling the heli's behaviour much better than MS flightsim does. With the same stick etc in Flightsim I don't have any problems doing similar flights.

In a real heli, with the collective pulled fairly high can you still pitch forward without problems? (I am trying to look at the gauges and not run it into the yellow or red zones for torque as I try to slowly behave like the real world!).

I would have thought from a physics point of view there should be no problem as the cyclic is moving the entire rotor disc effectively isn't it? So regardless of the blade angle it will still tilt ?

Hopefully it's something simple I've overlooked, as it does feel better in X-Plane when it's under control.